Over at the MInnPost, Karen Boros laments the near-demise of the City Hall reporter. She notes that thirty years ago, both papers, the TV stations and some of the radio operations all had reporters prowling both City Halls, actively working their sources for stories.

Then…?

Then someone invented the focus group – one of those gathering of citizens who are given nice snacks and asked to share their opinions on a product. One of the “products” they analyzed was the television news operation where I was a foot soldier.

What these citizens often said was that they did not want so much government news. They especially did not want Minneapolis City Hall news or St. Paul City Hall news, because many of them lived in the Happy Suburbs. News from the core city did not apply to their lives. Or so they thought.

So according to Boros, people moving to the “Happy Suburbs” (anyone else getting tired of the patronization, here?) got tired of city government news.

It’s a theory.  And I think it’s got merit – only Boros has it backwards.  And I think Karen Boros (who I’m going to use as a surrogate for the rest of the Twin Cities media) are at least in part to blame.

Both of the Twin Cities have been DFL fiefdoms and sinecures for generations – literally.  Since the forties.

And a key part of the infrastructure that has kept the DFL in office, in a place of honor alongside the unions, the public-service bureaucracy and the non-profits, has always been the Twin Cities media, whose bias toward the DFL has been palpable and constant.  No, not each and every reporter, every time; many reporters, even reporters with demonstrated political beliefs, did a perfectly fine job of staying personally detached.  But at the management and editorial level, the bias toward “progressivism” – they like to call it “Good Government” – has been a constant theme.   And that has been one of the many factors that have led the Twin Cities, like most major cities to have become one-party “progressive” hegemonies.

And that DFL hegemony has done what “progressive” one-party rule always does to cities; brought blight, misery, bloated budgets, a culture of entitlement (and I’m not talking welfare recipients, here), decayed and worthless schools.  Like many cities, the Twin Cities are slowly becoming enclaves of the wealthy and upper-middle class (Kenwood, Summit Avenue, Linden Hills, Saint Anthony Park) surrounded by neighborhoods that serve as warehouses for the poor administered by the social service bureaucracy, in turn surrounded by suburbs full of those who’ve had the option to secede from the system.

And the media dutifully played along, doing its bit to keep the DFL firmly in charge.  And a large part of the reason for the decline, decay and rot of the Cities must certainly be that when Boros conjures all those “tough questions” from the reporters of the past, it was never enough to make voters question the wisdom of the ruling one-party states the Cities had become.

And, tired of being the ATM machines and ripe sucks for the system, people moved to what Boros sneeringly calls “the Happy Suburbs”.  They pulled out of the the schools – leaving the school systems skewed and warped, and begging for warm bodies to put in seats.  They took jobs in the “Happy” and productive suburbs, skewing the machine’s assumptions about demography (and prompting an orgy of spending on transit and punitive taxes to try to corral them back downtown.  They moved to redder zip codes, changing the traditional political assumptions and slowly eroding the DFL’s power base, prompting ever-more-desperate gerrymandering to try to shore up the DFL’s power base.

For a couple of generations, people have been voting with their feet to try to reduce the power of the DFL, its minions and its machine in their lives.

Why should they want to get dragged back to it on the 6PM news every night?  It has nothing to do with them.  And they spent a lot of time, effort and money to make it that way.

Times and technology change. Now, those Minneapolis City Council meetings are telecast on Channel 79.  You can watch from the safety of your own living room as council members debate the fees to license a dog or work their way through the budget.  But you can’t ask questions after the meeting like a reporter can if they are in the building.

But if the reporters had asked the “tough questions” that really needed to be asked over the past sixty years – is this spending wise? Is Urban Renewal/tearing down Rondo and Phillips to make way for freeways/warehousing the poor in the inner city/the war on drugs a good idea in the long run?  Why do our schools get worse, the more money we throw at them? Is one-party rule, even if it is rule by people who reflect our worldview, the way to get better Cities? – then there might not have been a problem in the first place.

And if there are two competing reporters in the building, you know that each of them will be trying to get something for their story that the other won’t have. News is still a competitive business — which is why I miss that crowd of reporters.

But the media stopped asking the “tough questions” that mattered decades ago.  And long before bloggers took over the “asking tough questions of the DFL” beat that the media stopped bothering with, the people asked them themselves.  They did the only “City Hall Reporting” that really matters, and asked the toughest question of all; “are the taxes, the trouble, the crime, the denigration, the eroding standard of living, the systematic disenfranchisement of dissent, worth it?”

And the answer sent them not to the news stand, but to the, ahem, “Happy Suburbs”.

Boros blames the people who fled the cities for wanting news that made her beloved, mythical hard-nosed gumshoes obsolete.  But the media machine played its role in the flight in the first place.

Will they ever learn that lesson?